The impact Joseph Wolpe has made on behavior therapy has been stable and persistent. His dedication to the world of psychology lasted until almost a few months before his death, when he was still lecturing around the world.

Both psychology and psychiatry owe to this prolific psychiatrist the knowledge and current success of the interventions and treatments of any type of phobia from the cognitive-behavioral point of view.

Next we will give a brief review of the life of this researcher by means of a biography of Joseph Wolpe .

Who was Joseph Wolpe? Brief biography

Famous psychiatrist of South African origin, Joseph Wolpe managed to position himself as one of the most influential personalities in behaviour therapy .

Born in South Africa in 1915, Wolpe spent his academic years at the University of the Witwatersrand. He later received the Ford Fellowship for pre-doctoral studies, which gave him the opportunity to move for a year to Stanford University in the United States, where he could study psychology at the Center for Behavioral Sciences.

After that year at Stanford University, Wolpe returned to South Africa. In 1960, however, he returned to the United States after accepting a job at the University of Virginia, where he stayed permanently.

After five years at that institution, Wolpe accepted a position at Temple University in Philadelphia , where he remained until 1988.

Your involvement in the study of anxiety

A milestone that marked Wolpe’s life forever, and influenced him in his later work, was his enlistment as a medical officer in the South African army. Wolpe’s main motivation for enlisting was to treat soldiers who, after returning from battle, suffered from what was then called “war neurosis” . Nowadays, this affliction is known as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

At that time, the intervention performed on soldiers was based on the administration of a type of serum known as “truth serum”, under the belief that talking openly about traumatic experiences cured this type of neurosis. However, the treatment was rarely effective.

This failure in the results was what made Wolpe, a staunch follower of Sigmund Freud and of psychoanalytic theories, question this type of intervention and begin to investigate other treatment options .

This change in the direction of his interests as a mental health professional led him to develop his work within the field of behavioral psychology. His reciprocal inhibition techniques, specifically systematic desensitization , were the ones that earned him a place of honor within the history books of psychology.

Joseph Wolpe died in Los Angeles in 1997, at the age of 82.

Wolpe’s contributions to psychology

As mentioned above, Wolpe’s leap from analytical psychology to the more cognitive-behavioural paradigms, made him introduce great changes and contributions in this area.

Of these, the most important are the reciprocal inhibition techniques, and the famous systematic desensitization (DS). In reviewing the life and work of Joseph Wolpe, it is essential to know about these types of therapeutic resources, one of his main contributions to mental health.

Reciprocal inhibition techniques

In his quest for more effective interventions and treatments for psychiatric conditions, specifically for the treatment of anxiety ; Wolpe developed his techniques of reciprocal inhibition, which were based on assertiveness training.

Wolpe’s idea of reciprocal inhibition was based on generating feelings or responses in patients that were incompatible with the sensation of anxiety, and thus reducing anxiety levels.

In the beginning of his research Wolpe used cats to which he offered food while presenting a conditioned fear stimulus , using the act of eating as a way to inhibit the anxiety response.

After achieving successful results with cats, Wolpe used reciprocal inhibition in his clients in the form of assertiveness training. The psychiatrist’s hypothesis was that a person is not capable of being aggressive, or of experiencing feelings of irritation or anger, at the same time as assertive feelings or behaviors.

These assertiveness trainings proved to be especially useful for patients who had symptoms of anxiety before social situations or some kind of social phobia. However, these interventions lacked positive results when faced with other types of phobias.

As a result of this failure to improve other phobias, Wolpe developed his most well-known intervention protocol in psychology, systematic desensitization (DS). According to this protocol, when a patient is directly confronted with his fears, extreme feelings of frustration can be generated, so the best way to overcome them was to expose himself gradually.

Systematic desensitization

Wolpe developed and perfected an action protocol for the treatment of phobias which he called Systematic Desensitization (DS).

Systematic desensitization consists of gradually presenting the patient with a series of images or contexts to which he may feel some kind of phobia , while he performs a series of relaxation exercises.

Wolp’s main idea is that no person can feel relaxed and anxious at the same time, so relaxation would inhibit the feelings of anxiety or fear that the patient experiences towards any object or situation.

There are three steps or stages within this protocol, which should be carried out after the clinician has done a comprehensive case formulation, or what Wolpe called “behavioural analysis”.

These steps within systematic desensitization are:

1. Step one: training in relaxation techniques

Wolpe accepted the model of muscular relaxation proposed by Jacobson , modifying it to make it somewhat shorter and more effective.

In this first stage, the professional must teach the patient the relaxation techniques so that, later, the patient can carry them out in the following steps of the treatment.

2. Step 2: Create a hierarchy of anxieties

During this second stage, the therapist and the patient draw up a list of situations or contexts that generate feelings of anxiety in the person, in any of their forms.

They are then ranked or ordered, starting with those with the least anxiety or stress and ending with the one that causes the most fear in the patient.

3. Third step: systematic desensitization

The next and final stage consists of the patient putting into practice the relaxation exercises learned in the first stage, getting the patient to relax completely. Meanwhile the clinician will show or relate the different images extracted from the previous step, starting with those of lesser degree of anxiety .

Depending on the patient’s reaction, the patient will either move on to the next higher grade image or the process will be repeated until the anxiety levels have decreased.

Despite possible failures during the process, such as inadequate image order or patient failure to relax, systematic desensitization has proven to be one of the most successful interventions in treating phobias.